Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, the diamond’s first European owner, called it “un beau violet”—perhaps the only possible...
An amusing, if gaga, history of the world’s most prized blue stone, from a specialist in the biography of luxury.
Fowler (The Way She Looks Tonight, 1996) treats the story of the Hope Diamond as if it were a real bodice-ripper, describing the gem as “Nature’s absolute kernel of energy and beauty, of her striving, driving, pounding life-force.” And the stone delivers. Fowler’s heroine was born in southern India, with enough boron in its chemistry to give it a gorgeous violet-blue coloration. Fowler imagines the stone first as the third eye in a statue of Siva, a religious transporter, glorious and holy. But it began on the slippery slope to degradation and written history when a French trader and adventurer bought it and in, turn, sold it to King Louis XIV. Since there’s precious little to say about the stone beyond describing its settings and the ways it has been displayed, Fowler provides biographies of its owners, making them as racy as possible. From the French royal family the diamond passed, via a robbery during the Revolution, into the tawdry precincts of the Hopes, a wealthy English banking family—whose subsequent fall from financial grace bestowed upon the newly christened Hope Diamond the legend of the stone’s curse—and thence to the King of Diamonds, jeweler Harry Winston of New York, who gave the stone to the Smithsonian. Fowler manages to impart plenty of information about the diamond, but her weakness for the fabulous sweeps all before it. She may be the only writer who could make a geologic process sound like a Hamptons soirée, as a volcano unleashes the stone with “the fizz and roar of a million champagne corks.”
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, the diamond’s first European owner, called it “un beau violet”—perhaps the only possible description more purple than Fowler’s prose.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-44486-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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